Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A shrub (Fouquieria splendens) of Mexico and the southwest United States, having long spiny stems and clusters of scarlet tubular flowers.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, and Lower California, a name applied to several species of Fouquieria, especially to F. splendens, a shrub which grows in arid, stony soil, and which has many spiny stems terminating in slender panicles of red flowers.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any of various
succulent plants unrelated to thecactus , in the genus Fouquieria, living in Central America or the southwest United States.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun desert shrub of southwestern United States and Mexico having slender naked spiny branches that after the rainy season put forth foliage and clusters of red flowers
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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In his dusty yard stands his nephew, Ben Erskine, a boy just past the threshold of adolescence, tall for his age, as lean as one of the ocotillo wands that fence the yard.
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I went to the spiky bushes—ocotillo, was that the name?
To Fetch a Thief Spencer Quinn 2010
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I went to the spiky bushes—ocotillo, was that the name?
To Fetch a Thief Spencer Quinn 2010
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I went to the spiky bushes—ocotillo, was that the name?
To Fetch a Thief Spencer Quinn 2010
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The rain sweeps over the thirsty silent basins of yucca and mesquite and cardón cactus, over the slopes of ocotillo and acacia.
Kook Peter Heller 2010
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We move through scrubby pines until we emerge onto a scene of blooming cacti, thorny ocotillo plants with licks of flame shooting from their tips, slithering lizards, and brown rabbits whose long ears have been adapted to circulate blood and keep them cool.
In the Fullness of Time Emily W. Upham 2010
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At the base of the mountains, on the gentle rocky slopes called bajadas, the vegetation is dominated by paloverde, ocotillo, and saguaro, but bitterbrush is also a common shrub.
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Yucca, sotol, lechuguilla, ocotillo, and cacti now dominate the rocky slopes below 5500 feet.
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Vegetation includes mostly desert shrubs, such as sotol, lechuguilla, yucca, ocotillo, lotebush, tarbush, and pricklypear, with a sparse intervening cover of black grama and other grasses.
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Vegetation is a sparse, but diverse, shrub cover that includes creosote bush, white brittlebush, white bursage, and occasional Sonoran desert elements, such as ocotillo.
trivet commented on the word ocotillo
From wiki:
The ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens - also called the coachwhip, Jacob's staff, and the vine cactus) is a curious, and unique desert plant of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. For much of the year, the plant appears to be an arrangement of large dead sticks, although closer examination reveals that the stems are partly green. When rain comes, the plant quickly becomes lush with small (2-4 cm) ovate leaves, which may remain for weeks or even months.
July 14, 2007
reesetee commented on the word ocotillo
Interesting--I'd never heard of this plant before.
July 14, 2007